Gretchen Lopez

Overview:

Education:

Ph.D. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
B.A. Cornell University

Gretchen Lopez, Assistant Professor in Cultural Foundations of Education, is Director of the Intergroup Dialogue Program and associated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her main research focuses on race, gender, and critical multicultural education in higher education. She is interested in the intersection of theory, research, and practice as it informs understandings of diversity, inequality, and processes for creating change through education. Recently she has extended this research to engage high school students and consider the significance of university-community partnership.

Professor Lopez's background is in social psychology and she applies a multidisciplinary, multi-method approach to studying social issues in education. She has published research in Educational Record, Journal of Social Issues, New Directions for Higher Education, Political Psychology, and Race, Ethnicity, and Education; and is currently co-editing a special-themed issue of Equity & Excellence in Education on ”Intergroup Dialogue: Engaging Difference, Social Identities, and Social Issues.”

Lopez led the university’s participation in the Multiversity Intergroup Dialogue Research Project, a nine-institution study of the educational benefits of intergroup dialogue for undergraduate students. As part of this project, she initiated the development of an intergroup dialogue program funded through the Chancellor’s Initiative Fund and Academic Affairs. The program recently received the Foundation Award for Outstanding Campus Organization from the SU LGBT Resource Center (2011); and earlier, a Chancellor’s Feinstone Grant for Multicultural Initiatives (2009-10).

Lopez previously led the violence prevention project, focusing on conflict resolution, and held the position of Faculty Associate for Diversity, through the Office of Undergraduate Studies and working with the Division of Student Affairs in addition to in the School of Education.

For Fall 2011, Lopez has been awarded a Research Associateship at the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center located at Mount Holyoke College in MA. Additional information about her work is provided through the Intergroup Dialogue Program, and her Critical Lessons and Educational Change website.